Henry H. Perritt, Jr., Professor of Law and former Dean of
Chicago Kent College of Law, and author of a forthcoming book about the Kosovo
Liberation Army, and Kai Sauer, Senior Political Adviser to MarttiAhtisaari, the Special Envoy of the UN Secretary General
for the Future Status Process for Kosovo, are co-authoring a book about the
final status process for Kosovo. They have been encouraged in this endeavor by
President Ahtisaari, who has promised full
cooperation.

The book provides the inside story of the best-orchestrated
diplomatic initiative of the early 21st century: the process for
determining the future status for Kosovo, a former province within Yugoslavia.
It was written with the encouragement and active cooperation of MarttiAhtisaari, former President
of Finland and Special Envoy of the UN Secretary General responsible for the
future status talks.

The final status negotiations were aimed at putting to rest
the conflict that had erupted in 1998 between Slobodan Milosevic’s forces and a
guerrilla insurgency known as the Kosovo Liberation Army. Some 800,000 Kosovo
residents were expelled from their homes and NATO fought its first war. The
hope was that the status negotiations could make the 1998-1999 conflict the
last war over the breakup of Yugoslavia.

The negotiations provided an opportunity to prove that UN-sponsored
processes could still be relevant after the UN was sidelined in the runup to the Second Iraq War. They offered a way for the US and the EU
to demonstrate their continued capacity to work together on security issues—and
for the EU to build confidence in itself as a credible actor on the
international scene. And they offered Russia
a chance to restore its prestige in foreign affairs, providing leadership to
developing an internationally crafted solution involving one of Russia’s
historic client states. They gave the UN a chance to show that it could craft a
graceful, controlled, exit from a nearly 10-experience in exercising
sovereignty and overseeing nationbuilding—a far
greater challenge than more traditional peacekeeping or refugee relief
operations.

MarttiAhtisaari
was in charge of pursuing all these opportunities. The account of how he
pursued them involves strong-willed characters with idiosyncrasies,
insecurities, personal hatreds and friendships; competing plots; and more than
enough conflict to go around.It shows
how Ahtisaari dealt with hidden agendas, historic
geopolitical concerns and distorted perceptions of what was likely to happen if
the negotiations failed.

The story shows how diplomacy, shepherded by the techniques
and diplomatic experience gained by the leader of a smaller country, honed in
earlier successes in Namibia, Northern Ireland and Aceh, not backed up by great
unilateral military power or economic leverage, can blaze a trail toward
self-determination and democratization.

The book should appeal to anyone interested in foreign
affairs, and the future ability of the international community to provide
coherent solutions to deep-seated problems that otherwise spill over into wars
and other threats to international peace and security. It should appeal to
anyone interested in the options available to the United
States as it learns from its active engagement in this
multi-lateral process, in Russia’s
approaches to defining its strengthening role on the international stage, and in
China’s
thinking as it works to understand how its growing economic, military and
political power should be used.

Written even as the “end game” of the final-status
negotiations is being played, the book will be released just as the final
Kosovo decisions are made by the key players, and the first steps are taken
toward implementing the decisions.